Michael Jackson…
Well that was a strange week...My producer had set up this amazing mic and pre-amp in my house so I could relax and do vocals on my own time and not even have to get dressed. (I’m not saying I WASN’T dressed; I’m just saying…) The Blue Bottle mic, this unbelievable tube pre-amp, a blanket draped across two mic stands for baffling, all was right. Suddenly, Blam! Ed McMahon dies! Blam! Farrah Fawcett dies! And then…the biggest blam of all–Michael Jackson dies.
The first 2 I took notice of because they were news–because they were part of our popular culture quilt…The last one…Well, the last one stopped me from singing, made my legs shake, made me have to sit down and put my head in my hands for a while.
The thing is, not only was Michael Jackson a huge celebrity; “Thriller” was the first tape I ever bought with my own money. (Yes, I said tape.) It’s impossible to separate him from my childhood.
As I got older, I went backwards through his career–first to “Off the Wall”, then back to the Jackson 5 and the old old soul coming out of a 10 year old boy…Though I loved his dancing, the intensity of his voice was what always captured me. Michael could wail and coo in the same breath–he wrote the catchiest hooks I’ve ever heard; there was never any doubt but that he OWNED every single song he ever performed. He influenced me deeply. Not that I was aware of that when I was a little kid–I just knew I loved it. I wanted to go to sleep at night listening to it. It felt very very real to me.
There was also the fact that he was/is the single biggest pop culture icon of more than one generation. Bigger than anything–more widely recognized. That seeps into a society’s consciousness, and it seemed like Michael Jackson and our collective identity got weirder and weirder…As he got older and stranger and more and more disfigured by his repeated surgeries and pill-popping and need for instant gratification and over-consumption, we mirrored it as a nation. And it became more difficult for me to appreciate his later releases. His combination of (what seemed to me like) delusion and self-loathing permeated his writing and performances. And he had become such an enormous global figure that I couldn’t disentangle the sense of who he had become from his brilliant earlier work.
Luckily though, I also couldn’t disentangle his earlier work from who he had become. The countless allegations, the hanging the baby over a ledge–they never stopped me from appreciating the sheer joy that came from listening to his music.
I know Michael Jackson was abused as a child–I know he grew up on television and on tour, and I know he suffered terribly. Maybe that’s part of what made the beauty of his voice and writing so poignant. At any rate, his death just plumb knocked the breath out of me. Maybe he’s found some peace. Would that we all could—before we go.
A few favorites:
“Human Nature”
“Off the Wall”
“Rock With You”
“Got to be There”
“The Way You Make Me Feel”
“Billie Jean”
